Catching up matchdays 1-5: no rejoicing

By: jhb | September 19th, 2009

The start of the season was pretty much the usual affair of “uh, is it started yet?” sleepiness of all our players in the DFB cup and the first half of the first match. I don’t know what kind of lemons they serve in the Ruhrstadion locker rooms, but the second half of that match looked like they had woken up and no mistake. The first away trip was a more or less expected hammering at Schalke 04, followed by a surprise win at home to Berlin (who are terribly disappointing so far and find themselves almost at the bottom). So far – so good, you’d think. But another two losses (Leverkusen and in Hoffenheim, (where we couldn’t half repeat last year’s performance), and shouts of “Koller raus” could be heard surprisingly loud, given that it was still only four weeks into the season.
What the heck did they expect? Virtually no signings over the summer (and of the few, only Johansson seems to get regular first-team starts) and the whole of last season pretty much pointed to what this year was going to be like, so why blame the manager? He could have tried to insist on more (and more expensive) signings, but I it’s the president etc who seem to think we’ll get away with this squad. Koller has to take the blame for last year’s signings, though: two “happy family” signings of former Bochum strikers who turned out a) injured most of the time and b) abject whenever they were played. This leaves us with Klimowitz (the only half-decent signing of that year) and Sestak up front, one of which is usually injured in any given week.
The back four are performing more consistent and, most importantly, the centre backs can be chosen 2-out-of-4 equivalently good players, so in case we stay up another year, it will likely be thanks to a good defense. Let’s hope Epallé and Azouagh will score the goals our strikers can’t be bothered to score…

Today, however, we have matchday 6 running. Mainz is visiting us, and the fans decided to keep silent for the first 18:48 minutes (a reference to the VfL’s founding year 1848). The team gave the right answer by scoring in the 5th minute, making everybody cheer.

(Shortly before half-time, Mainz have just equalised. !!UPDATE!! 40 seconds after that, we take the lead again! Klimowicz! I’m off to grab a beer, talk to you again after the match.)